Painting Prophecy · 2019. 10. 23. · colonial antecedents, as Sanchez-Tranquilino points out in his catalog essay: “Rarely, ifever, werethepre-Columbiancodicesorcolonial facsimilesnamed

A Native American Pegboard and a Chicana Codex:

Multimedia Practices of Memorialization in the Americas

Painting ProphecyMapping a Polyphonic Chicana Codex Traditionin the Twenty-First Century.............................................................................................................................................................................

ananda cohen-aponte and ella maria diaz

Abstract This article examines the work of the Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez, who

created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that con-

sists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico.

Rodriguez’s Codex draws on pre-Hispanic, colonial, and Chicana/o/x antecedents, most

notably the Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) and the Chicana/o/x codices of the early

1990s, produced in the context of the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage. This article

posits Rodriguez’s Codex as a polyphonic text that exceeds both the linguistic of the lit-

erary and the visual of the artistic, drawing on a multiplicity of sources, both historical

and contemporary, visual and textual, oral and aural, in her mapping of California’s land

and history. The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón collapses precolonial, colonial, and con-

temporary histories to underscore continuities between the ruptures of conquest and

our dangerous geopolitical moment.

Keywords Chicana/o/x art, codices, commemoration, indigeneity, polyphony

I n 2017 and 2018 the artist Sandy Rodriguez produced a series of maps and botan-ical illustrations that together comprise the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, whichshe exhibited at the South of the Border and the Rodriguez/Valadez in Vernon showsin Southern California.1 The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón remains a work in prog-ress, as Rodriguez continues to add new pages of varying dimensions, from fifteeninches to nearly eight feet tall. Exhibited as separate folios rather than as a boundbook, Rodriguez pushes the codex form beyond Eurocentric notions of print andmanuscript culture. She also processes native plants and minerals into the dyesandwatercolors that she uses to paint each work, which she creates on amate, a spe-cial paper produced from the bark of fig and mulberry trees with origins in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.2 Foregrounding native and precolonial materials in themaking of her codex, Rodriguez reclaims and redraws the rich history of paintedMexican codices in order to respond to contemporary crises of migration, displace-ment, and ecological destruction in the twenty-first century.

english language notes

57:2, October 2019 doi 10.1215/00138282-7716125© 2019 Regents of the University of Colorado

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The painted books of Mesoamerica belong to an image-based form of knowl-edge transmission that stretches back for more than a millennium. Yet today thereexist fewer than twenty known surviving pre-Columbian codices due to the large-scale book burning campaigns conducted by Spanish friars in the wake of the con-quest of 1521. The destruction of indigenous books was followed by their replicationin the postconquest era as friars and colonial officials oversaw the re-creation ofdestroyed originals by indigenous painters, alongside the emergence of hybrid gen-res, including encyclopedias and herbals that combined Nahua and early modernEuropean systems of knowledge and representation. Hundreds of these colonialcodices survive,many of which detail the events of conquest and life under Spanishcolonial rule.3

TheCodex Rodriguez-Mondragón draws on this disruption and convergence ofknowledge systems in the colonial-era codices, andmost directly from theFlorentineCodex (ca. 1575–77), a twelve-volume encyclopedia of Aztec life produced under thedirection of Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and painted by indigenoustlacuiloque, or painter-scribes and grammarians who were expert in Aztec tradi-tions of recording knowledge.4 Educated in the painting style of the European Ren-aissance at the Real Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the tlacuiloque served ascritical interlocutors between indigenous elders and Spanish colonial administra-tors, consulting with them as they painted imperiled knowledge in a moment ofurgency—as one world drew to a close and another began in its ashes. The Floren-tine Codex is paradigmatic of what Mary Louis Pratt calls art of the contact zone—adialogical, intercultural, and multiauthored work made in the shadow of the seis-mic devastation of conquest and amid a second epidemic that killed millions ofindigenous peoples in 1576. Facing existential crisis, the tlacuiloque continued topaint and record their histories in Nahuatl using the Latin alphabet, as Sahagúntranslated the texts into Spanish. The urgency of the moment prompts scholarDiana Magaloni Kerpel to ask, “What did the Florentine Codex mean to the Tlate-lolco team who decided to devote their lives to completing it amid a mortal bat-tle against death itself?”5 Magaloni Kerpel’s question frames our reading of theCodex Rodriguez-Mondragón, a multivocal map that traces the “theoretical dimen-sions of power that struggle over geography’s hold” and lays bare the “relationshipsset forth during colonialism that continue to mark us today.”6

Even as Rodriguez’s Codex recalls the sixteenth-century practice of recordingknowledge amid the rubble of conquest and its traumatic repetitions in the ensuingdecades, her work also resonates with the production of Chicana/o/x codices in1992, a year indeliblymarkedby the LosAngeles riots, theAIDScrisis, and the quin-centenary of Columbus’s voyage to the so-called New World. Rodriguez’s Codexanticipates the 2019–21 quincentenary of the Spanish invasion and conquest ofMexico during the latest moment of rupture: the election and presidency of DonaldTrump. Engaging cyclical notions of time through commemoration alongside exis-tential fears and speculative futures inherent to linear progressions, the CodexRodriguez-Mondragónmaps a space in theWestern Hemisphere that has witnessedthe ends of worlds and the beginnings of new ones.

Cohen-Aponte and Diaz … Painting Prophecy 23


The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón makes visible overlapping histories of colo-nialism in California and northernMexico, revealing stories that subvert the Euro-pean cartographic traditions that visualized domination and naturalized Europeanpower and authority within the Western Hemisphere.7 Marking lines of demarca-tion, detainment, and surveillance among the flora and fauna of the region that shepaints in the tradition of the Florentine Codex, Rodriguez adds her place-basedmemories next to those of unhomed people and other human beings who are heldoutside nationalist confines of belonging. We thus see Rodriguez’s Codex as a poly-phonic text, destabilizing master narratives of discovery that avowed territorialexpansion as a civilizing mission of empire and its reiterations in capitalism as anideological value and economic policy of the Americas.8While polyphony refers toa Western musical tradition and is framed by literary theorists as a hallmark ofEuropean modernism, we contend that the phenomenon has points of origin inthe Americas and through what Miguel León-Portilla calls “singing the paintedbooks” of the Aztecs.9 Polyphony is evidenced in the aural/oral poetics of codices,perhapsmost clearly conveyed in this passage from theCantares mexicanos, a collec-tion of Aztec songs from the sixteenth century:

I sing the pictures of the books,and see them widely known,I am a precious bird / for I make the books speak,there in the house of the painted books.10

Rodriguez’s Codex both draws on a hemispheric repertoire of oral traditions andinspires its own “singing of the maps” through the poetic invocations of AdolfoGuzman-Lopez. In its layering of symbols and visual allegories, collaborative anddialogical research, as well as the very materiality of the paper and pigments usedto create it, the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón offers a view of the un/settled groundonwhich all of usmove and navigate anuncertain time in the twenty-first century.11

Art of the Contact Zone: The Chicano Codices of 1992The year 1992 ushered in a surge of artistic production centered on the five hun-dredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. Artists such as CocoFusco, GuillermoGómez-Peña, Nao Bustamante, and James Luna intervened in his-tories of indigenous, African, and mestiza/o/x bodies on display, producing provoc-ative performance art that challenged dehumanizing stereotypes of non-Europeanpeoples, while reminding audiences that the origins of these visual tropes can betraced to 1492.12 These performances offered a critical counternarrative to the tri-umphalist tone of the official commemoration events that took place in the UnitedStates, Spain, and select parts of Latin America. The quincentenary also spurredMexican and Chicana/o/x artists to reclaim the pre-Columbian and colonial LatinAmerican archive in their work. Artists like DelilahMontoya and Enrique Chagoyarethought the space of printed literature by creating codices that narrativizedimages and symbols and reframed sixteenth-century conquest and colonization as

english language notes 57:2 … October 201924


allegories for sociopolitical and environmental crises in the last decade of the twen-tieth century.13 Collapsing the space of time between the colonial and postcolo-nial in their contemporary interpretations of codices made by Nahua painters andscribes in the decades following Spanish conquest, Chicana/o/x artists reconfig-ured the codex as an artistic method for resisting legacies of colonialism embeddedin dominant cultures and institutions.14

In 1992 Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino curated an exhibition of contemporaryChicana/o/x codices at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, California, to chal-lenge unqualified celebrations of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. Theexhibition, titled The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas, proposed“the indigenous art form of the codex as a contemporary Chicano artistic medium”that symbolically restored “the dispersed and destroyed pre-Hispanic picture booksof the Americas.”15 In so doing, Sanchez-Tranquilino foregrounded a central claimof the 1960s and 1970sChicanomovement inwhichChicana/o/x artists (re)alignedwith their indigenous ancestry over their European heritage through a political andpoetic reclamation of mestizaje, a term for racial mixture originating in Spanishconquest, reframed as a nationalist project in postrevolutionary Mexico and dis-cernible in the visual and formal mixtures of Chicana/o/x artistic production.16

In their fusion of forms, the Chicana/o/x codices exceeded Eurocentric defi-nitions of the bound book. Somewere fashioned in accordion-style screenfolds thatemulate the format of the original pre-Columbian divinatory almanacs. Others con-sisted of multiple unbound sheets of paper. In some instances, they eschewed theconcept of books altogether, presenting instead mixed-media pieces that incorpo-rate canvas paintings, display boxes, simulated art objects, and pseudo artifacts. InCodexMuñoz: Petrocóatl, Aztec God del fin del Mundo, Celia Muñoz presents a head-dress, made from a gas mask and framed with feathers, of a prophetic Aztec deity,Petrocóatl (oil feather god), who “will save us (and the planet) from our dependenceon petroleum.”17 The Codex Muñoz resounds in the sardonic performance art of1992—from the self-fashioned costumes and headpieces of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s Couple in a Cage to Nao Bustamante’s Indig/urrito.

To account for the range of forms, Sanchez-Tranquilino further describedmestizaje as a “zone” in which Chicana/o/x artists enact a “new mixing, a new fieldof identity—a complex cultural and theoretical space beyond two halves comingtogether.”18 Emanuel Martinez’s Codex Emanuel: The Quincentenary: In Light ofQuinto Sol exemplifies the process Sanchez outlines by featuring a tripartite head,or an image of two heads in profile that create one face in the middle, signifyingChicana/o/x identity.19 A sculptural work, Martinez’s codex unrolls the history ofconquest fromwhich theChicana/o/x emerges: fallen bodies of indigenous peoplesand a pantheon of Mexican revolutionaries and Independence leaders unfold on ascene, including the tripartite head, painted by an indigenous woman. The recla-mation of a colonial process of racial mixture by Chicana/o/x artists, as seen inthe Codex Emanuel, has been interrogated over decades of Chicana/o/x culturaland literary scholarship, primarily critiqued for its appropriation of indigenousidentity that, as María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo contends, romanticized it “as an



ancestral past rather than recognizing contemporary Indians as coinhabitants notonly of this continent abstractly conceived, but of neighborhoods and streets of hun-dreds of US cities and towns.”20

Nevertheless, as Rafael Pérez-Torres writes, mestizaje—as an artistic and cul-tural discourse—allowed “Chicanos to recognize a shared colonial as well as racialhistory with Native Americans and other indigenous groups across the Ameri-cas.”21 Shared colonial and racial histories as expressed in Chicana/o/x art and poet-ics have shaped coalitional politics since the 1960s, when “groups of Chicana andNative American activists . . . worked together in common cause.”22 Commoncauses led to real infrastructure, including institutions of higher education likeD-QUniversity in Davis, California, founded in 1971 and in operation until 2005.23Its title an abbreviation for Deganawida and Quetzalcoatl, D-Q University was acoinhabited space where the “‘trope of mestizaje’was deployed not to erase contem-porary Indian concerns” but “to foreground and address them.”24DelilahMontoya’sCodex Delilah: Six-Deer, Journey from Mexicatl to Chicana exemplifies the politicalstrategy of visualizing shared colonial and racial histories of Native Americansand Chicanas/os/xs through her critique of nuclear weapon and waste productionin the US Southwest. Weaving together Maya, Mixtec, and Aztec symbols andglyphs,Montoya foregrounds indigenous epistemologies to expose themodern col-oniality of nuclear missile manufacturing in the Sandia mountains of NewMexico,which are figured as Crow-Woman, a healer who lives on the mountain and whomSix-Deer seeks.25

Alongside numerous indigenous-identified Chicanas/os/xs in the 1960s and1970s were those whose “ambivalent relationship towards their indigenous ances-try” was influenced not only by Mexico’s modern campaign of cultural and biolog-icalmestizaje but also by the changing of their racial status fromSpanish andWhiteto Hispanic and nonwhite Hispanic in the United States across the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries—further exacerbated by de facto and legal discriminationsagainst Native and Mexican Americans.26 Chicana/o/x ambivalence toward theirindigenous heritage pertains to the trauma of cultural loss and fractured indige-nous knowledge in the context of the US matrix of power; representations of thatloss are palpable in the exhibition of The Chicano Codices.

Loss and fracture narrativizes the Codex Not-Vargas: The Forgotten NameCodex, in which Kathy Vargas uses the triptych to stage three mixed-media photo-graphs with inscriptions that reflect the haunting “loss to Chicanos of all theirindigenous names.”27 In fact, each codex featured in the show bore the name ofits maker and was appended with a subtitle. The naming conventions of the Chi-cana/o/x codices signaled a conscious departure from their pre-Columbian andcolonial antecedents, as Sanchez-Tranquilino points out in his catalog essay:“Rarely, if ever, were the pre-Columbian codices or colonial facsimiles named afterthe indigenous owner or scribe/artist.”28 Indeed, most codices are named aftertheir European patrons, the institutions in which they are housed, or the cities inwhich they reside. The Florentine Codex, for example, is named as such due to itslocation in the Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy. Even in cases where names ofthe indigenous artists are known, the colonial codices typically retain their ascribedEuropean titles.29



Symbolically, then, theChicana/o/x codices counter Eurocentric naming con-ventions by laying claim to them in the writing of the artists’ names. While onecould argue that this practice reifies Eurocentric traditions of authorship and own-ership (in the ideological and economic structure of theUnited States), self-namingis less about possession than about emplacement, which, as Karen Mary Davalosposits, seeks “locatedness and belonging” beyond “European orientations, mean-ings of space, and attachments to place and power.”30 Emplacement requires imag-inaries like the zone that Sanchez-Tranquilino theorizes for Chicana/o/x codices—which echoes Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness (1987) and anticipatesEmma Pérez’s Decolonial Imaginary (1999)—or a third space of encounter, colli-sion, and convergence, producing new modes of knowledge transfer.31 Thesespaces for re-membering indigenous knowledges after their dismemberment(fracture and loss), require the “‘imaginative’ creation of new possibilities,” whichMishuana Goeman argues “must happen through imaginative modes preciselybecause the ‘real’ settler colonial society is built on violent erasures of alternativemodes of mapping and geographic understandings.”32

Similar to indigenous frameworks for (re)mapping through “non-normativegeographies,” as Goeman posits for “vibrant Native futures,” the Chicano Codicessuggested a decolonial pathway for speaking to ancestors who were removed frompersonal and familial memory throughwar, annexations, and state policies. If colo-nial codices tell a history of commercial and diplomatic exchanges between Euro-pean patrons and collectors through their names, the Chicana/o/x codices recenterthe knowledge of the tlacuiloque, who in both the pre-Columbian and the colonialperiods served as themediators of knowledge on behalf of the community. The art-works featured in The Chicano Codices exhibition do not merely tell the stories ofindividual authors or lay claim to the stories; rather, they are deployed politicallyin regard to intersecting histories of colonialism, annexation, and nation making.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Sanchez-Tranquilino’s description ofmestizaje as a “zone” participated in a larger discourse on cultural syncretism. In1990, for example, Mary Louise Pratt proposed the art of the contact zone as aspace where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contextsof highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism and slavery or theiraftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”33 Pratt’s frame-work responded to sociopolitical unrest, racial conflicts, and cultural polarizationin the United States concerning the art, literature, and history of the nation andcoincided with the Columbus quincentenary. Pratt relied on a colonial allegory tosituate her thesis on the contemporary contact zone, referring to the indigenousAndean author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose 1615 illustrated manuscriptdenounced the abuses of the Spaniards in early colonial Peru. In his “rediscovered”manuscript, Pratt identifies “autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collabo-ration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, [and]vernacular expression” as “some of the literate arts of the contact zone.”34 Whilemiscomprehension, “unread masterpieces,” and the “absolute heterogeneity ofmeaning” are “some of the perils of writing in the contact zone,” Pratt claims thatthese forms of communication “live among us today in the transnationalizedmetropolis of the United States and are becoming more widely visible, more press-



ing, and, like Guaman Poma’s text, more decipherable to those who once wouldhave ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and real-ity.”35 TheChicana/o/x codices employed each of thesemodes of communication—from imaginary, polyglossic dialogues to visual parody and social critique. Twenty-five years later Sandy Rodriguez continues the art of the contact zone, responding toongoing threats of environmental collapse and national anxieties over “invasive”species and societal extinction in the context of the impending anniversary of Span-ish invasion and conquest of the Aztec empire in 2019–21.

Continuing a Chicana/o/x Codex Tradition

Rodriguez’s decision to name her recent body of work the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón does not directly reflect indigenous or sixteenth-century postconquestmanuscripts but rather gestures to the interventionsmade byher Chicana/o/x artis-tic predecessors. The inclusion of her paternal andmaternal last names signals herposition as inheritor of intergenerational knowledge. The hyphen also connotes thecollaborative nature of her artistic practice, since the names reference not only indi-viduals but also families rooted in the Americas.36 In the sameway that indigenoustlacuiloque consulted elders to reconstruct pre-Hispanic lifeways and the events ofconquest, Rodriguez relies on a range of elders for knowledge about local medicinalplants and herbs of the region, as we will discuss shortly. The naming of her codex,then, gestures not toward the self but toward a community as a wellspring of mem-ory and knowledge.

Like her Chicana/o/x artistic predecessors, Rodriguez reclaims the codex as asite for the graphic expression of communal knowledge, exceeding itsmaterial stip-ulations as a set of bound or otherwise interconnected folios. To date, it includesthreemapas, of which two are accounted for here: theMapa de la Región Fronterizade Alta y Baja Califas, made in 2017, and, in April 2018,De las Señales y Pronosticos &ICERaids en el Sanctuary State of Califas (figs. 1–2). In between the production of themaps, Rodriguez painted botanical illustrations of native plants toward a goal oftwelve that function as an annual calendar, marking the seasons in which they areharvested formakingmedicine and pigments.37Thebotanical illustrations, like themaps, encode multiple and often divergent spatiotemporal contexts into the verymateriality of theCodex Rodriguez-Mondragón, underscoring its polyphonic quality.

In Nopalli–Opuntia basilaris (cactus), for example, as well as Cempoalxuchitl–Tagetes erecta (marigold flower), helicopters hover at smaller sizes relative to theplants they depict and are barely discernible as they blend into the natural pigmen-tation of the amatepaper (figs. 3–4).When viewers detect them, they realize that thehelicopter cockpits are actually skulls, and the compositions exceed the scientificand painterly genres they represent. The imposition of man-made surveillance tech-nologies deployed along the US-Mexico border on the botanical paintings disruptstheir calendric function. The juxtaposition of plants and helicopters also conveys atemporal irony, recording the passing of time through the seasons of plant lifewhilegesturing to the detention of people whose ancestors have inhabited and cultivatedthe lands of the Western Hemisphere for millennia. As many US citizens proceedwith their daily lives, they are oblivious to the suspension of time fordetainedpeoples,for those seeking asylum, and for those awaiting reunification with their families.



Analogous to thepolyphonic quality of the botanical illustrations, Rodriguez’slarge-scale maps merge pre-Hispanic and European mapping methods, aligningwith the hybrid forms of the 1990s Chicana/o/x codices. The large-scale mapas donot fully emulate the morphology of ancient painted codices. Rather, their large,single-sheet format conforms most perceptibly to lienzos, which illustrate familylineages andwere shownpublicly or used in litigation both in the colonial andmod-ern periods as a means of asserting land claims.38 Lienzos often combine represen-tations of land, important historical events, and individuals or ruling families asso-ciatedwith such events by including human figures within a delineated territory orfootprints to signify human presence and passage through space.39

While the first and second maps of the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón includeonly a fewhuman figures directly within the defined space of California, Rodriguezalludes to the importance of human-related events in more subtle ways: throughthe demarcation of borders, the locations of detention centers, and the tools of sur-veillance for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All these visual ele-ments have a temporal dimension, simultaneously connoting centuries of changeto the natural world through the built environments that shape the border region ofthe twenty-first century. These human elements are inlaid in the maps along withrepresentations of plant life, like cacti in bloom, which signify late spring andsummer in arid regions of Southern California and northern Mexico. Rodriguez’scodex, then, manifests a temporalization of space, an extension of Miguel León-Portilla’s reading of Mesoamerican pictorial histories as spatializations of time.40

Rodriguez’s codex also continues the Chicana/o/x codex tradition of fore-grounding cyclical time in the commemoration of world-changing events andfuture predictions that respond to the existential fears of Western societies orientedalong linear timelines. The artists of the 1992 Chicano Codices narrativized the cat-astrophic impact of 1492 as the context for social and environmental disasters at theend of the twentieth century. This visual language prompted Chicana writer Cher-ríe Moraga to sing the painted books—transcribing their symbols and poeticizingthe connections they pose between the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’sarrival and cataclysmic events of the late twentieth century. “It is 1992 and LosAngeles is on fire,”Moraga writes:

Half a millennium after the arrival of Columbus, the Mesoamerican

prophecies are being fulfilled. The enslaved have taken to the streets, burning

down the conqueror’s golden cities. A decade-long plague that attacks the very

immune system upon which our survival depends assumes pandemic

proportions. . . . With such violent movement, our ancient codices have

predicted, this era—“El Quinto Sol”—will be destroyed.41

Moraga’s essay disrupts Eurocentric notions of linear time as progress by refiguringstate violence against marginalized and oppressed peoples as prognostications pre-saged by the Aztecs in the Calendar Stone and the codices.

Originally written as a catalog essay for The Chicano Codices, “Codex Xerí: ElMomento Historíco” reappeared as the final entry of Moraga’s The Last Generation(1993), an anthology of essays and poems that takes as its central metaphor the “dis-



Figure 1. Sandy Rodriguez, Mapa de la Región Fronteriza de Alta y Baja Califas,2017. Hand-processed dyes and watercolor from native plants and earth pigmentson amate paper, 94½ × 47 in. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.



Figure 2. Sandy Rodriguez, De las Señales y Pronosticos & ICE Raids en elSanctuary State of Califas, 2018. Hand-processed dyes and watercolor fromnative plants and earth pigments on amate paper, 94½ × 47 in. Collection ofthe artist.



Figure 3. Sandy Rodriguez, Nopalli–Opuntia basilaris from the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, 2017.Hand-processed dyes and watercolor from native plants and earth pigments on amate paper, 151=3 ×22¾ in. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.



Figure 4. Sandy Rodriguez, Cempoalxuchitl–Tagetes erecta from the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, 2017.Hand-processed dyes and watercolor from native plants and earth pigments on amate paper,151=3 × 22¾ in. Ellen Hoobler Collection.



covery” and conquest of the Americas. For our purposes, it is noteworthy that Mor-aga’s central metaphor begins in the visual realm, using the codices as a point ofdeparture for her prose. She assumes the position of priestess who deciphers and“sings the books,” performing one of the “multiple stations of codex production[of ] the ancient Mexican Tlacuiloque” and suggesting that the codex “resists theWestern ideology of writing as a solitary act”;42 from its precolonial, colonial, andcontemporary forms, the codex brings together multiple voices in its visual expres-sion and inspires new ones through ekphrastic poetry prompted by the work itself.

Materiality and Process in the Codex Rodriguez-MondragónAs other Chicana/o/x andMexican artists have collaboratedwithwriters on text andinscriptions for their codices, Rodriguez foregrounds collaboration through a com-munity of elders. Engaging art historians, curators, researchers, a trained herbalist,and the staff and unhomed clients of a community hospital, Rodriguez also offeredher codex to poet Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, who sings the book in narrative poemsthat emulate the literary structure of the Nahuatl passages in the Florentine Codex.“Why does the green of that cactus touch my soul?”Guzman-Lopez calls out to thepaintedNopalli–Opuntia basilaris, adding, “Whydo those shades of pink remindmeof my ancestors and of their toil over the earth in the old country?”43 In poetic incan-tations that emulate those of the Florentine Codex, Guzman-Lopez usurps a domi-nant trope of American immigration history to subvert the east-to-west orientationof the nation, imagining what José Saldívar calls “an alternative AmericanBildung,”or a different location for the “central immigrant space in the nation.”44 From asouth-to-north trajectory, Guzman-Lopez relocates the “old country” to theWesternHemisphere and, specifically, to the south of theUS-Mexico borderlands, reframingland not as possessionbut as “amarker of shared space among a range of travelers—Native Americans, Chicanas/os, Mexicans, and others willing to live concurrentlyand harmoniously on Turtle Island.”45 Sharing the space of her codex with a com-munity of people—her fellow travelers—Rodriguez extends the story of her homeregion to include several realms of knowledge, resonating with the collaborativenature of the Florentine Codex and other sixteenth-century manuscripts.

Born in National City, California, Rodriguez descends from a family of Mex-icanpainters andworked inmuseumeducation atmajor institutions in LosAngelesdesigning arts education programs for community centers for nearly twenty years.Hermovements between elite institutions and community spaces alerted her to thedisparities of access to the arts. Rodriguez connected these economic inequities inthe availability of art resources to the history of color in the Americas, which sheexplains, “involves sixteenth-century colonization and the imposition of colonialvalues on native cultural traditions of cultivation in the Western hemisphere.”46 In2016 Rodriguez was awarded an artist residency by the Los Angeles County ArtsCommission, and she designed and taught watercolor workshops to staff, adminis-trators, therapists, and unhomed clients at the Recuperative Care Center (RCC) oftheMartin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital. Her lesson plans directly involvedparticipants in making organic colorants from the region; they “saw, felt, smelled,touched, and in some cases, tasted the materials in various states, [grinding] plantsand insects into pigments in a mortar and pestle.” Contact with natural materials



spurred questions from the class to which Rodriguez pursued answers at the GettyCenter; she spokewithmuseumexperts as she studied seventeenth-century naturalhistory illustrations, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ethnobotanical records,and books 11 and 12 of the Florentine Codex (which detail the flora and fauna ofthe Aztec world and Spanish conquest) as well as contemporary scholarship onthis sixteenth-century encyclopedia. Immersed in dialogical research, Rodriguezconnected the dots between art, labor, and colonialism in the Americas. “I wasengrossed by the way that colonized people worked plantations andmissions to cul-tivate and process local resources,” she recalls, “and how these colors can stand infor the labor upon the reception of the very material.”

Yet “there were also questions about the materials that I couldn’t answer,”Rodriguez adds, and so she enrolled in the Blue Wind School of Botanical Studiesin 2017. Studying the edible and medicinal flora of California’s central coast in SanLuis Obispo with the herbalist Tellur Fenner, Rodriguez embarked on a three-month program of field studies in the Sonoran, Mojave, and Great Basin deserts.Sharing her sketches of plants, animals, and landscapes with the RecuperativeCare Center’s staff and clients, Rodriguez offered specimens and images from his-toric sources. “The participants would comb through my notebooks,” she recalls,“and chime in when they recognized a plant from their own family histories—from times that they spent with their grandmothers.” In finding answers to theunhomed clients’ questions, Rodriguez accessed their memories of homeplaces,listening to their stories of different uses of plants within their family traditionsand adding them to her repertoire of institutional knowledge based on her accessto collections and museum specialists.

When the residency concluded, Rodriguez expanded her field studies to thePacific Northwest, New Mexico, and El Cajon foothills near San Diego, California.Equipped with skills acquired from her museum education work, community col-laborations, and botanical and field training, Rodriguez completed the Mapa de laRegión Fronteriza de Alta y Baja Califas and four botanical illustrations that com-prised her codex at the end of the summer of 2017 and in time for her first exhibi-tion. But one could also argue that her codex began prior to its existence as an artobject—when she transgressed genres of art and literature as well as fields of his-tory and medicine to learn and teach the production of native colorants. In her col-laborative approach to learning, teaching, and painting the codex, Rodriguezpushed back against colonial systems of classification that persist in disciplinaryborders and compartmentalize knowledge, separating art and history from medicineand ceremony, as well as isolating their forms—from the textual and visual to the oraland performative. Rodriguez restores each of these modes of knowledge by fore-groundingconversation andmediationof the different times and spacesof knowledge,which in turn, produces the polyphonic quality of the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón.

Mapa de la Región Fronteriza de Alta y Baja CalifasAgainst the natural reddish-brown fiber of the amate paper, Rodriguez outlines thenineteenth-century boundaries of California on the map, but she “unborders” theland annexed by the United States in 1848, extending the line to theMexican statesof Baja California and Baja California Sur. As the only territorial demarcations on



the amate, the lines visually suggest that California floats on the paper. The opticalillusion conjures the origin of California’s name, which derives from a sixteenth-century Spanish romance novel describing an Edenic island. This was imposed onthe land by Spanish explorers in search of such mythical places following the Span-ish conquest of Mesoamerica.47 Bordering and “unbordering” the colonial-turned-national lines of territory, Rodriguez plays with Western notions of time as both alinear progression and an ideological value of progress rooted in imperialism anddiscernible in thegeographyof global capitalism.48Doing so confronts the dominantcultural experience in the United States of land as a “project of accumulation”—what Goeman describes as division into “disaggregate parcels at various European-conceived scales” that devises “multi-scalar ways of thinking about land as dividedup into different domains andwhich carries the weight of the colonial and its ongo-ing consequences.”49 From hemispheres and continents to nation-states and reser-vations, the scales of land add up over time, eliding interconnections between spe-cies and habitats and codifying the borders between human and nonhuman insubject-object relationships.50

Within the bordered and “unbordered” land, Rodriguez also combines aerialviews of color-coded climate zones with detailed vistas of mountain ranges, fields,and waterways, but she illustrates the flora and fauna at larger scales relative tothe map, drawing on pre-Hispanic techniques of pictorial scaling reflected insixteenth-century colonial codices that visually compress time or represent timepassing in space. A prickly pear cactus, for example—of the genus Opuntia andknown in Spanish as nopal, a name derived from the Nahuatl word nopalli—islush in bloom, corresponding with other green and flowering flora located in spe-cific areas on the map and producing an intervisual relationship with Rodriguez’sbotanical illustrations. As previously mentioned, the size and color of the plantssuggest more than their locations; they also denote a space of time, specificallythat of spring or early summer. Each plant reappears outside the map and withinthe boxes that illustrate Rodriguez’s production of the pigments she used to createit, signifying the cyclical rhythms of human-plant relationships, which we havecome to expect but which are rapidly changing due to climate change.

Furthermore, in these boxed illustrations Rodriguez explains that she“included historic images of plant harvesting and processing, representing myselfin the role of the tlacuilo (painter), connecting past and present.”51 By locating her-self in the map and revealing her artistic process, Rodriguez not only records thenatural histories of the upper and lower border regions of California but also com-municates communally sourced knowledge from her institutional and botanicalstudies that was corroborated by the unhomedpeople at theRecuperative Care Cen-ter, themselves displaced andmarooned from their homeplaces amid global capital-ism’s borderless economy. Rodriguez’s self-portraits echo those of the painters inbook 11 of the Florentine Codex, recording another interval of time between the colo-nial past and the speculative future in the contemporarymoment of climate change,species displacements, war, and national uncertainty.

Turning to the coastline, Rodriguez populates the Pacific Oceanwith real andimaginary sea creatures that originate in medieval and Renaissance cartography,



a tradition of representation that shaped several genres of visual art and scientificknowledge and influenced the Nahua painters of the Florentine Codex (ca. 1575–77).52 From book 11 on “Earthly Things,” Rodriguez replicates the papalomichi andocelomichi, or flying fish of the family Exocoetidae, to allegorize childhood memo-ries of Catalina Island and Baja California.53 Farther down the coast, Rodrigueztakes creative license with her image of the quauhxouili, described as an “eagle” inboth Spanish andNahuatl in book 11. Reinterpreting the fish as a parrot, Rodriguezmaps her memories of white sand beaches produced from the waste of the Scaruscompressus, or azureparrotfish, alongwith the ayotl, or tortuga, whichmade it impos-sible for her to walk along the beaches in Cabo San Lucas during its breeding sea-son, when her family returned to one of their homeplaces.54

At the same time that she maps interconnected ecologies through personaland sharedmemories, Rodriguez subtly documents the construction of geopoliticalspace through her insertion of man-made locations that intrude and disrupt thenatural environments of indigenous species, which include native peoples. Territo-rial intrusion and disruption is the story of the NewWorld and, indeed, the story ofnearly all colonial and contemporary codices. On closer inspection of themap, view-ers see that Rodriguez has painted small circles with sharp points that mimic mapcoordinates. The circles are, in fact, razor wire, and these unnatural marks on themap are locations of facilities in which ICE detains undocumented people in theUnited States.55The razor-wire circles visually echo the archetypal image of impris-onment in theWestern imagination followingWorldWar II that dominates the vis-ual index of the US-Mexico border in the late twentieth and now the twenty-firstcentury. The symbols amplify the map’s temporalization of space: it is within thesespaces that people literally wait time out as the nopal blooms, the beaches in CaboSan Lucas turn white, and the breeding season of the ayotl comes and goes.

De las Señales y Pronosticos & ICE Raids en el SanctuaryState of CalifasProduced in 2018, Rodriguez’s second map builds on the codex’s themes of intru-sion and disruption by plotting the convergence of natural andman-made disastersthrough representations of California’s wildfires in late 2017 and arrests made byICE in early 2018. If the Mapa de la Región Fronteriza centers intergenerationalmemory and knowledge amid interlocking cycles of time, then the mapDe las Señ-ales y Pronosticos catapults viewers directly onto the ground and the immediacy ofhuman crises and environmental dangers. De las Señales y Pronosticos reveals aninterplay of detainment and containment in California and the chaos that such dis-turbances cause to all species. The wildfires, for example, denoted by glyph-likeflames, push billowing clouds of gray smoke into the ocean. They are arranged sys-tematically along the coastline as if their containment will soon prove an impossi-bility. The helicopters with skull cockpits appear above the ocean, alluding to theunintended impact of wind and carbon emissions as ocean currents swirl in dan-gerous chaos. A large-scale octopus grasps an airplane in its tentacles, evoking thesea monsters of medieval and Renaissance maps to communicate contemporaryfears over the unknown fate of marine life amid rising ocean temperatures.



Moving to the land, fireballs rage outside the perimeters of detention cen-ters, which are depicted from above, imitating aerial shots of buildings capturedby drone surveillance footage. The fireballs cannot penetrate these walled com-pounds but also provide another barrier to escape. The territorial demarcationsare more clearly defined in De las Señales y Pronosticos than in the first map, solidi-fyingCalifornia as a space of containment. Color-coded climate zones and locationsof flora and fauna have all but disappeared, and human beings enter the territorialspace of themap, blurring the visual conventions of the first map as well as those oflienzos and codices in the precolonial and colonial traditions. The human beings inthe map are hooded farmers who toil in the agricultural fields of the central valleyunder the light of stars, suggesting labor exploitation due to the interminable needfor profit but also in response to drastic temperature changes that have disruptedharvesting cycles.

The calamity continues in the boxed illustrations that border the map anddescend to the right of the state of California as Rodriguez uses most of thesespaces to illustrate the apprehension and arrests of undocumented peoples andactivists in protest of ICE raids. But Rodriguez appears in one frame among a gath-ering of female figures on both sides of a fire. Like hermother and sister, Rodriguezpaints scholars with whom she has been in dialogue about the materials, process,andmeaning of her codex in the twenty-first century. Named after thefirst omen inbook 12 of theFlorentine Codex, titled “De las señales y prognósticosque aparecieronantes que los españoles viniesen” (“Of the Signs and Prophecies That Appearedbefore the Arrival of the Spaniards”), Rodriguez’s second map restages the Aztecprophecies as occurring in “real time,” amid the rupture of Donald Trump’s presi-dency. Perhaps the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is book 13 of the Florentine Codex,linking sixteenth-century conquistadores with the ICE agents who patrol andenforce a heavily militarized landscape in the twenty-first. Like Cherríe Moraga’s“Codex Xerí,” penned in response to the artworks of the Chicano Codex exhibition,Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s verses offer poetic transcription of the visual language ofthe Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón. Reading the signs and symbols of both maps,Guzman-Lopez returns to the theme of predictions and prognostications to remindviewers of their significance in our contemporary moment:

The power of prophecyis not that it foretells the futurebut that it shakes usinto seeingour present.56

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

ananda cohen-aponte is associate professor of history of art at Cornell University. She

works on the visual culture of colonial Latin America, with special interests in cross-

cultural exchange, historicity, identity, and anticolonial movements. She is author of

Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (2016).



......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

ella maria diaz is associate professor of English and Latina/o studies at Cornell

University. She is author of Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping

a Chicano/a Art History (2017), for which she won the 2019 Book Award of the National

Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Association.

AcknowledgmentsOur thanks to Sandy Rodriguez for her generosity insharing her materials and insights with us. We aregrateful to Kristi Peterson and ELN’s two anonymousreviewers for critical feedback in the writing andediting process.

Notes1 South of the Border took place at The Loft at Liz’s

from October to December 2017. Rodrigueznext exhibited her Codex in a two-person showwith the canonical Chicano artist John Valadezin Rodriguez/Valadez in Vernon, from April toJune 2018, at East 26 Projects in Vernon,California.

2 In researching the history of amate, Rodriguezconsulted López Binnqüist, “Endurance ofMexican Amate Paper.”

3 For further discussion, see Gruzinski, Paintingthe Conquest; and Jesús Douglas, “IndigenousPainting in New Spain,” 71–79.

4 Magaloni Kerpel, Colors of the New World, 2.On the life and work of Bernardino deSahagún, see Klor de Alva, Nicholson, andKeber,Work of Bernardino de Sahagún.

5 Magaloni Kerpel, Colors of the New World, 14.6 Goeman,Mark MyWords, 4. Goeman proposes

the Americas “as a social, economic, political,and inherently spatial construction [that] has ahistory and a relationship to people who havelived here long before Europeans arrived” (2).

7 We are inspired here by Karen Mary Davalos’sdiscussions of the limits of European notions ofcartographic “accuracy” through her analysis ofartwork by the Chicano artist Gilbert “Magu”Luján. See Davalos, “Landscapes of Gilbert‘Magu’ Luján.”

8 Cornejo, “Decolonial Futurisms.”9 Building onMikhail Bakhtin’s idea of a

“plurality of independent and unmerged voicesand consciousnesses” in the work of FyodorDostoevsky, Michael M. Ossorgin uses “visualpolyphony” to explore the “painterly aspects ofDostoevsky’s work—his imagery, ekphrases,visual descriptions” as “generative forces in hisfiction” (“Visual Polyphony,” 1–2). Slav Gratchevalso provides comparative analyses of

Dostoevsky’s prose and Miguel de Cervantes’sDon Quixote in the origination of thepolyphonic novel (Polyphonic World of Cervantesand Dostoevsky). Writing on the emergence oftestimonio as a Latin American literary genre inthe 1960s and 1970s, John Beverley framestestimoniowithin a polyphonic tradition:“Each individual testimonio evokes an absentpolyphony of other voices, other possible livesand experiences” (“Margin at the Center,” 16).We argue that the polyphonic element thatBeverley detects in testimonio is equally pre-Columbian in origin, as it is attributed to thepostmodern and intercultural dialoguebetween the interlocutor and the nativeinformant.

10 León-Portilla, Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, 5.11 See Carrillo Rowe, “Settler Xicana,” 531.12 Fusco and Gómez-Peña performed Couple in a

Cage: Two Amerindians Visit the West (1992–93)at several institutions. Bustamante performedIndig/urrito in 1992, and Luna performedArtifact Piece in 1987, entering a display case atthe Modern Museum of Man in San Diego,California. He followed it with End of the Trail(1990) and Take a Picture with a Real Indian(1991). See Diaz, “Seeing Is Believing,” 64–68;and Blocker, “Failures of Self-Seeing.”

13 While not included in the Chicano Codices,Enrique Chagoya contributed contemporaryworks with Tales from the Conquest/Codex(1992) and the Codex Espangliensis: FromColumbus to Border Control (1998), coauthoredwith Felicia Rice and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

14 Baca, “Chicano Codex,” 564.15 Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Chicano Codices,” 3.16 Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica; Davalos,

Exhibiting Mestizaje; and Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje.

17 Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Chicano Codices,” 4.18 Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Chicano Codices,” 4.19 Tripartite heads are iconic to Chicano art. See

José Montoya’s La Resuerreción de los Pecados(1971) at calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb9q2nb9mt and Amado M. Peña Jr.’sMestizo(1974) at americanart.si.edu/artwork/mestizo-35250 (accessed December 1, 2018).



http://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb9q2nb9mthttp://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb9q2nb9mthttp://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mestizo-35250http://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mestizo-35250

20 Saldaña-Portillo, “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán?,”413. Key interventions in the discourse onmestizaje following Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion ofthe new mestiza consciousness includeDavalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje; Beltran,“Patrolling Borders”; and Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje.

21 Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje, 16.22 Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje, 16.23 Diaz, Flying under the Radar, 53–55.24 Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje, 17. Criticism of

mestizaje as a trope for Chicana/o/x indigeneitycontinues in the twenty-first century withZepeda, “Queer Xicana Indígena CulturalProduction,” and Rowe, “Settler Xicana,” bothof which view Chicana/o/x claims toindigeneity through a lens of settler colonialismand the androcentrism implicit in Westernknowledge production.

25 Courtney, “Decoloniality,” 6, 19–20. Courtneywrites, “Crow-Woman represents the effects ofcoloniality at multiple levels: on the earth, in theform of environmental crisis, on the femalebody, and on indigenous epistemologies” (19).

26 Rowe, “Settler Xicana,” 530. Chicana/o/x claimsof indigenous ancestry were also ambivalentmimicry (Bhabha, Location of Culture) or a“strategic assertion of racial difference” in anation that altered the racial designation ofMexican Americans for over two centuries(Pérez-Torres,Mestizaje, 16). Calling oneself“Chicano” in the 1960s and 1970s also resistedthe modern Mexican use of indigenismo that“subsumes the Indian as a heroic past to themestizo heroic present” (Saldaña-Portillo,“Who’s the Indian in Aztlán?,” 408).

27 Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Chicano Codices,” 5.28 Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Chicano Codices,” 3.29 The Codex Mendoza (1542) is attributed to the

indigenous artist Francisco Gualpuyogualcaland the Spanish scribe Juan González, but itcontinues to bear the name of its patron,Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza.

30 Davalos, “Landscapes of Gilbert ‘Magu’ Luján,”42.

31 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Pérez,Decolonial Imaginary, 6. Pérez draws on HomiBhabha’s “Third Space of enunciation,” whichdisrupts the “structure of meaning andreference” in the cultural knowledge of aWestern nation, challenging “our sense of thehistorical identity of culture as ahomogenizing, unifying force, authenticatedby the originary Past, kept alive in the nationaltradition of the People” (Location of Culture, 37).

32 Goeman,Mark MyWords, 2.33 Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 34.34 Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 37.35 Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 37.

36 Sandy Rodriguez, interview with Ella Diaz,March 13–26, 2018.

37 Rodriguez, interview.38 Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 125–61.39 For more on the format and scale of lienzos, see

Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,” 215.40 Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,” 193. On

León-Portilla’s concept of the “spatialization oftime,” see Aztec Thought and Culture, 54–57.

41 Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 20.42 Baca, “Chicano Codex,” 572.43 Guzman-Lopez, “Untitled,” 30.44 See Saldívar, Border Matters, 29. Saldívar draws

on George J. Sánchez’s example of Los AngelesInternational Airport as a major immigrantpoint of entry (Becoming Mexican American,271).

45 Davalos, “Landscapes of Gilbert ‘Magu’ Luján,”45.

46 All quotations in this paragraph and the nextare taken from Rodriguez, interview.

47 Rodriguez consulted Petersen, “California,Calafia, Khalif”; and Masters, “Why Did a 1542Spanish Voyage.”

48 For further discussion of progress as a form ofsocial control and contemporary CentralAmerican artists who engage in this critique,see Cornejo, “Decolonial Futurisms.”

49 Aikau et al., “Indigenous FeminismsRoundtable,” 94.

50 Aikau et al., “Indigenous FeminismsRoundtable,” 94.

51 Rodriguez, unpublished artist statement, lastrevised October 18, 2017. Copy shared withauthors.

52 See Magaloni Kerpel, Colors of the NewWorld,15–19. For her artistic influences, Rodriguezconsulted Waters, “Enchanting Sea Monsterson Medieval Maps.”

53 Rodriguez, email to Diaz, April 23, 2018. SeeFlorentine Codex, pages 125 and 126, book 11,folio 63, at www.wdl.org/en/item/10622/view/1/125.

54 Rodriguez, email to Diaz, April 23, 2018. SeeHistoria general de las cosas de nueva España,book 11, folio 63, at www.wdl.org/en/item/10622/view/1/127.

55 Rodriguez, email to Diaz, December 3, 2017.Rodriguez studied an online map of private andlocal facilities in California that ICE uses(Pickoff-White, “MAP”).

56 Guzman-Lopez, “Numbers 11:29,” 33.

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Painting Prophecy · 2019. 10. 23. · colonial antecedents, as Sanchez-Tranquilino points out in his catalog essay: “Rarely, ifever, werethepre-Columbiancodicesorcolonial facsimilesnamed